Giuliani on Kerik’s Mob Connections: ‘I Can’t Recall’

This is the guy who’s leading the Republican pack for the presidential nomination.

He’s about to name a guy to be police commissioner and finds out that the prospective nominee is doing favors for a mobbed up construction company. He ignores the advice and nominates him anyway. And even worse, he later persuades George Bush to nominate him as Homeland Security chief. Now that Kerik appears to have been a ripe slime ball, Rudy simply can’t recall being warned:

Mr. Giuliani defended Mr. Kerik, a friend and business partner, whom he had recommended to the Bush administration. But he also tried to shield himself from accusations that he had ignored Mr. Kerik’s failings.

“I was not informed of it,” Mr. Giuliani said then, when asked if he had been warned about Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Interstate before appointing him to the police post in 2000.

Mr. Giuliani amended that statement last year in testimony to a state grand jury. He acknowledged that the city investigations commissioner, Edward J. Kuriansky, had told him that he had been briefed at least once. The former mayor said, though, that neither he nor any of his aides could recall being briefed about Mr. Kerik’s involvement with the company.

But a review of Mr. Kuriansky’s diaries, and investigators’ notes from a 2004 interview with him, now indicate that such a session indeed took place. What is more, Mr. Kuriansky also recalled briefing one of Mr. Giuliani’s closest aides, Dennison Young Jr., about Mr. Kerik’s entanglements with the company just days before the police appointment, according to the diaries he compiled at the time and his later recollection to the investigators.

Sure, let’s make this guy president. Couldn’t be worse than the guy we’ve already got, right??